Do Not Go Gentle Into That Long Off-Season

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

—A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Green Fields of the Mind

It took about four or five minutes after the World Series ended, watching Jonathan Papelbon jump four or five feet in the air in celebration after recording the final out that cemented a Boston sweep, for me to realize that the next day, there would be no baseball. This may not seem like a particularly amazing revelation, but at the time, it carried a great deal of weight. After 162 regular season games and 14 mostly outstanding postseason games, the 2007 Red Sox had become a part of history.

And with the final game of the baseball season comes the seemingly endless offseason, with the focus turning from last night’s game to next year’s roster. Alex Rodriguez is a sure bet to command an annual salary of at least $25 million, the Sox are faced with the prospect of losing fan favorites Curt Schilling and Mike Lowell, and baseball is preparing itself for the full release of the Mitchell Commission’s investigation into steroid use among players. You’ll forgive me if I wouldn’t like to turn the clock back a few weeks and replay the playoffs.

Of course it’s much easier to look wistfully upon a season gone by when your team has made it to the top of the mountain. Sox fans have had their victory parade and the wave upon wave of articles and stories proclaiming the team as the new model for baseball, as the heir apparent to the Yankee dynasty of the 1990s. What follows will be the celebratory DVDs, the player appearances on late-night television, and the piles of merchandise—when I get back from fall break, there should be a “2007 World Champions” T-shirt waiting for me in the Lerner package room.

For 29 other MLB teams, another year without a championship has come and gone. The heartbreak isn’t in the end—the heartbreak started at the beginning. Norries Wilson knows a little bit about that, too. For two straight years, the Columbia football team has started, to put it delicately, on the wrong foot, dropping winnable games and blowouts alike, with the Ivy League campaign written off before the midpoint of October. The only people who will be saddened by the end of Columbia’s season this year are the opposing Ivy head coaches.

But last year, Columbia football gave its fans, however few remained at that point, reason to hold out hope for the next year. A team that looked lost all year regrouped, got past Cornell, squeaked by Brown, ended the year at .500 for the first time since 1996, and raised the possibility that maybe, just maybe, better things were finally in store. And so the fans waited through the offseason, watched the senior leadership graduate, learned about the highly touted recruits that were making their way to Morningside Heights, and analyzed the team’s chances to match or, crazily enough, improve on last year’s record.

We’re in that same spot again one year later, going into the season’s fifth Ivy League game with exactly zero Ivy League wins. The seniors at this school will graduate never having seen a homecoming win; the current class of juniors can only hope that we’ll avoid the same fate.

But as bleak as it looks, this team once again has that chance to take the fans out on a high note. True, all three remaining Ivy opponents—Harvard, Cornell, and Brown—are much improved from a year ago. But with the right breaks and a full-out team effort, maybe the Lions can raise their prospects for next season, and, if not convince us that better things are in store for 2008, at least assure us that 2007 wasn’t a totally lost cause.

Columbia football has three chances left to end the 2007 season on a higher note. Here’s hoping that they make the most of it.